


for better or worse

by smartalli



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, Grief/Mourning, Harvey and Grammy have an actual relationship, M/M, Minor Character Death, season 1 Donna
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-12
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-13 04:33:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11177115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smartalli/pseuds/smartalli
Summary: Mike and Harvey are two days away from closing out a merger that would net Pearson Hardman the equivalent of five months of Harvey’s normal billables when Mike gets a phone call from the nursing home. Harvey watches as Mike’s face pales and his head bows, and Harvey’s stomach turns over.No.





	for better or worse

**Author's Note:**

> I started this ages before they killed Grammy in the show - way back in season 1 - but abandoned it when it was close to done after they sprung that little plot point on us. I thought maybe people wouldn’t want to read it, so it’s just been sitting in my folder, gathering dust. I forgot about it for years, and then I came across it the other day and decided I hated leaving it there, unfinished. I hope it was worth finishing.

**for better or worse**

**. . . . .**

Mike and Harvey are two days away from closing out a merger that would net Pearson Hardman the equivalent of five months of Harvey’s normal billables when Mike gets a phone call from the nursing home. Harvey watches as Mike’s face pales and his head bows, and Harvey’s stomach turns over.

_No._

When Mike hangs up, his phone practically falls out of his hand, and he stutters words like _grammy_ and _hospital_ and _ohgodnopleasegod_. His hands shake and his lip is _this close_ to trembling, and he breathes Harvey’s name, as if one word could save him from all of this.

_Harvey._

Donna comes running in with Mike’s bag and his jacket – because she’s _Donna_ and she _knows_ , and Christ, he doesn’t pay her enough – and tells them Ray is already waiting for them downstairs. She bundles Mike up in his jacket, slipping his limp arms through the sleeves like she’s dressing a two year old, and tells Harvey that Ray will be waiting downstairs to take him to the hospital when his meeting with Jessica is done.

_Shit._

Mike turns scared, pleading eyes at him, and Harvey would do anything to put his coat on and take the elevator downstairs with them right now, but he can’t skip this meeting with Jessica and the client. It’ll be a thirty minute delay for him, at most, but it still feels too long, and Harvey knows big things, things that can’t be changed or taken back or stopped, like grandmothers dying in hospitals, can happen in far less time than it will take him to walk the short distance from his office to Jessica’s.

Harvey stands there in the middle of his office, his eyes searching Mike’s, and says nothing. He wants to be comforting and reassuring; he wants to tell Mike his Grammy will be fine. It will all be fine and Harvey will make it to the hospital in time – they’ll both make it to the hospital in time – and all of this will simply become a slightly troubling story they’ll tell with deep breaths and declarations of their own luck. _Do you remember when you got that call?_ But he doesn’t want to make a promise he can’t keep. Not to Mike. And the only reassurances he’s ever been any good at have to do with contracts and terms and disclosures, anyway.

Dying grandmothers are not Harvey’s area of expertise.

He puts his arm around Mike’s back and walks him to the elevator bank, and when the doors open, leaves him in Donna’s more than capable hands. He shoves his hands into his pockets and watches as the doors close in front of his boyfriend’s stricken face, and he feels a sudden surge of anger at his own failure to be what Mike needs at the second worst moment of his life.

Mike has told him the story before, told him in startling detail how it felt to wake up at his Grammy’s house to an insistent knock on the door at two in the morning. How he’d held out hope it was his parents, or a next door neighbor, even though he knew it wouldn’t be. He was eleven years old and wearing pajamas that were too big for him, and he’d forgotten to tell his parents he loved them before they went out for the night. He still remembers the way the blue and red lights of the patrol car sliced through the living room windows and made shadows on the wall. He remembers the air outside bit at his nose when he opened the door. He remembers there was ice on the front steps, and he remembers that the last name of the officer standing at the door was Callahan. Her eyes were pale blue, her hair was pulled back into a bun, and she smelled like cigarettes. Menthols.

He’ll remember this too. All of it. Harvey knows that because he knows Mike. He knows how his brain works. He’ll remember that Donna smelled like wildflowers, because her boyfriend had just given her a new perfume. He’ll remember the sound of the elevator doors shutting and the smell of the shampooed carpet in Ray’s town car, and the measured panic in Donna’s voice when she asks Ray if he can go any faster.

Mike’s brain is a precious, remarkable thing, and sometimes it lets him down.

+

Harvey doesn’t make it to the hospital in time.

His meeting with Jessica doesn’t run long, he doesn’t get stuck in traffic, there’s no last-minute call from a client. He just doesn’t make it in time.

Neither does Mike.

+

Harvey’s rushing through the lobby when he gets the text from Donna. Her message is short. To the point.

_Coded in the ambulance. Nothing they could do._

+

When Harvey makes it to the hospital, he finds Mike sitting on a bench across the hall from Emergency Room 4, his body bent practically in half, head in his hands, tense fingers burrowed into messy hair. Harvey sits down next to him quietly and puts his hand on the back of Mike’s neck, and feels him shudder and shake beneath his palm. Through the windows of the ER, Harvey can see a body on the gurney in the center of the room, a white sheet covering its face like a shroud.

“She just...she...they think it happened because she was sick last week. Because she had that flu that she couldn’t shake. Remember?”

Harvey remembers. They’d brought her chicken soup that Donna made from scratch because Grammy had complained that nursing home soup couldn’t cure anyone of anything, that it was simply watered down off-brand sludge.

“They said her immune system was probably too weak and she just...she couldn’t...”

Harvey leans back against the wall and begins rubbing Mike’s neck.

“She really liked you. Really, _really_ liked you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He lets out a soft, wet laugh. “She said you were the best decision I ever made. Not that it’s much of a contest.”

Mike drops his hands from his hair and unfolds himself, leaning back against the wall next to Harvey. Harvey’s hand drops away and Mike leans into him, dropping his head with a thud against the wall behind them.

“Hey.” Mike looks over at him and Harvey’s thumb comes up and brushes the apple of Mike’s cheek. “I really liked her too.”  

+

Harvey’s mother and his younger brother are alive. He has a set of grandparents upstate, a niece and a nephew, a sister-in-law, a great aunt in New Jersey, and various aunts, uncles, and cousins all across the country. And even though he rarely calls any of them, if he needed to, he could. Mike is alone. And Harvey suddenly feels embarrassed by his gluttony.

+

Donna, secretary of the year, goddess divine, brings them coffee. It tastes like shit, but coffee is coffee, and the caffeine helps a little. Mike downs most of his in one gulp and then proceeds to start playing with the cup in his hands, pulling and bending the paper rim. Donna barely touches hers and stands there with her arms crossed, frowning and shifting her weight repeatedly. Restlessness is a new look for her. Harvey sips at the coffee from the blue and white paper cup in his hand and stares through the windows in front of him, and he wonders if there’s anything he could say that Mike would even want to hear. He tries to remember what people said to him when his dad died but it’s a blur, flavored by McCallan and grief. The standard words of condolence all seem ridiculous – how is Harvey supposed to know if Grammy’s in a better place? – but he can’t come up with anything more appropriate, and Mike deserves better than a mass market Hallmark card offer of condolence.

So he relishes the precious heat of Mike’s thigh pressed up against his own, considers pressing a little closer, and says nothing at all.

“Mr. Ross?” They look over and see a woman in her fifties clasping a stack of papers to her chest. She is petite and soft-spoken, and wearing about a pound too much makeup. “Whenever you’re ready, I’d like to talk to you about where you go from here.”

Donna excuses herself to go wait at the car with Ray, wrapping a surprised Mike up in her arms momentarily. He hugs her back, and thanks her, and if this were a normal day, Donna would throw a snarky comment his way, something about puppies and obedience training and not shedding on her favorite coat. Instead she gives him a final squeeze and a kiss on the cheek, and tells Harvey she’ll see him at the car.

Harvey reaches out for Mike, his fingers grasping at the lapel of Mike’s suit coat of their own accord. A private action in a very public place. “I can stay.”

Jessica would understand if he told her he had to stay, that Mike needed him. Harvey doesn’t know how much help he’d actually be – he’s fairly certain Mike can fill out paperwork by himself – but that’s beside the point. He wants Mike to ask him to stay, to give him some sense of what he needs. Harvey doesn’t like feeling useless. Is no good at it.

Mike shakes his head. “I’ll be okay.”

“Mike-”

“It’s...it’s fine. Besides, what can you really do, anyway?”

Right.

“As soon as I get this paperwork filled out and Grammy’s room at the home packed up, I’ll take another look at the Shovenko financials. Make sure I didn’t miss anything.”

“Mike, if you’re entertaining some idea that you’re coming back to work today, I’m going to have to stop you right there.”

“But I’ve done all the legwork on this case.”

“And no one’s taking that away from you. But your grandmother just died. As of about five minutes ago, you’re on bereavement leave.”

“Harvey-”

Harvey pulls him closer, tilts his head to chase Mike’s eyes with his own when he looks away. “You have plenty of other things to do. You have people to notify and things to take care of. You have to plan a funeral.”

Mike flinches and he feels like an asshole for even saying it, but Harvey’s never been good at sugarcoating things like that, and that’s not how they work, anyway. Besides, that’s not what Mike needs right now. He knows what he _wants_. He _wants_ to bury himself so deep inside of his work he can’t be pulled out.

Life doesn’t always give you what you want. No matter how hard you wish for it.

Judging by the look on his face, Mike’s not happy with him. It’s not a wholly unexpected reaction.

But if he doesn’t force Mike to do this, Harvey knows how this will all play out. Mike will throw himself into his work, avoid the calls from the nursing home and the funeral home and allow himself to pretend that Grammy is still just a phone call away, waiting for Mike to stop by with a kiss on the cheek and a head full of stories. It’s dangerously easy to get sucked into that line of thinking, and Harvey won’t let that happen, not to Mike.

“Take care of Grammy’s things. Sort through everything. Decide what you’re going to keep and what you’re going to give away. Make the necessary phone calls. And in two days, when Louis and I finish this merger, we’ll figure out how to give Grammy the sendoff she deserves. Donna can help.”

“You’re working with Louis?”

“I’m working with Louis.”

“Voluntarily?”

He tilts his head. “Voluntarily.”

Mike looks at him. A clock ticks above them on the wall, the only sound in the otherwise empty hallway.

“Okay.”

Mike nods, digs the tips of his fingers into his thighs, looks down the hallway.

“Okay.”

+

An hour later Harvey calls Mike, but he doesn’t pick up. He leaves a soft, slightly stuttered message about the case, about Grammy, tells Mike to call him if he needs _anything_.

He tells him he loves him.

Mike doesn’t call him back.

He calls three more times after that, and Mike doesn’t pick up for any of them. Harvey leaves a message each time.

He doesn’t call back after those either.

+

“Dammit, Louis. You need me to hold your hand now?”

The other line cuts off abruptly, and Harvey slams down the receiver in response.

“When was the last time you talked to Mike?”

Harvey looks up from where he’s standing behind his desk and squints at Donna. “What are you still doing here?”

“The more hands you have, the sooner it gets done.”

“You’re not a lawyer.”

She lifts an eyebrow. “I’m Donna.”

He nods. “Valid point.”

“I repeat: when was the last time you talked to Mike?”  
“Donna-”

“No.” She marches up to his desk, points a firm finger at him, cocks her hip. “No. No _Donna_. This merger is important, but so is Mike.”

Harvey slaps a folder down on his desk. “Is there some reason you think you need to explain that to me?”

“Maybe the fact that you’ve been at work non-stop for the last two days? You haven’t even gone home to sleep.”

“The couch is comfortable. And there was too much work to be done.”

“ _Harvey_.”

“I’ve called, Donna.” He shakes his head. At himself, at Mike, at Donna, at the whole stupidly fucked up timing of everything, he doesn’t know. But if he could be with Mike right now, he would be. He just can’t. “I’ve left him a dozen messages in the last two days, and he hasn’t called me back.”

“And you’re not worried?”

Here comes the anger again. “Of course I’m fucking _worried_. His grandmother just died and he won’t respond to me.”

She’s uncharacteristically quiet when she says, “No one would blame you for stepping out for an hour or two to take care of your grieving boyfriend.”

He eyes her. “Yes. They would.”

As if any of them care about Harvey’s personal life. As if he _wants_ them to care about his personal life. Everyone knows he and Mike are dating, but that was mostly due to the necessity of filing paperwork with human resources. Who they are to each other, _what_ they are to each other, they keep that out of the office. It’s private. It’s theirs.

No, what the clients and the partners care about is the _work._ They care about Harvey’s keen grasp of the law and Mike’s brilliant brain, and the magic they make together in the conference rooms and courtrooms of New York City. That’s what the clients pay for and the partners profit off of, and that’s how they like it.

As far as they’re concerned, Mike and Harvey don’t have personal lives.

“Let me rephrase that. Screw them.” Harvey doesn’t think he’s ever seen Donna so vicious, so immovable, so angry. “The merger is almost done. Louis can handle it while you take a couple of hours. Go make sure he’s okay.”

He’s not going to be okay. There’s no way he could be okay. But Donna’s right.

“I know what you’ve been doing,” she says quietly. “You’ve been doing exactly what you wanted to prevent Mike from doing. You’ve been throwing yourself into your work so you wouldn’t have to think about the fact that she’s gone.”

Harvey’s voice is even quieter when he says, “She wasn’t my grandmother, Donna.”

“No. But you loved her.”

+

Harvey knocks first, then uses his key to Mike’s place when there’s no response. The windows inside are closed and the air feels stale, unlived in. Nothing looks all that different from when they were both here a week ago, which can mean only one thing.

Mike isn’t here. He hasn’t been here since before he got the call.

Harvey slips back into the car, a quiet Ray up front, and asks to be taken home.

The condo is quiet when he walks in, and he’s almost afraid Mike isn’t here either, that he’s disappeared somehow, that Harvey won’t know where to find him, when he spies a discarded shoe on its side next to a chair, Mike’s suit jacket thrown haphazardly over the back of the couch. And then he sees Mike, sitting on the floor, staring at that embroidered panda picture, leaning up against the unlit fireplace.

So Mike did go back to his place. Not long enough to stay, just long enough to get that silly picture.

“Mike?”

Mike doesn’t acknowledge him, and Harvey comes around the edge of the coffee table to sit down in the chair next to him. Mike is still wearing his suit from the other day and Harvey wants to pull it off of him, wants to push his pain away, wants Mike to be okay.

He isn’t okay. Neither of them are okay.

Mike’s phone is sitting on the table and Harvey picks it up and tries to turn it on.

Dead.

“Mike.”

Harvey finally notices the two strips of black and white photos Mike’s holding in his hands. They’re from some photobooth out on Coney Island, if Harvey’s remembering correctly. One with Mike as a pre-teen, just after his parents died, one much more recent, as an adult. Grammy somehow looks the same in both.

Harvey slides down out of the chair and crouches next to Mike, leans in close and puts his hand on his back. He looks down at the photos in Mike’s hands and says, “I’m sorry, Mike. I’m sorry she’s gone.”

“I was a terrible grandson.”

Mike’s voice is thick and hoarse and broken and sounds nothing like him, and Harvey blinks quickly, looks away.

“That’s not true.”

“It is.”

He sounds so sure of himself, so resigned to the truth of it, and Harvey wonders if there’s anything he could say that would change that.

“C’mon,” he says. He stands and pulls Mike with him, and is relieved when Mike follows. But he stands there looking lost, like he doesn’t know where he is, and he looks back down at the photos in his hands as if they’re a place, as if they can anchor him. He stares and stares at them and then his face crumples and he lets out an anguished sob, bracing himself on the back of the chair with clenched hands when he can’t bear to support his own weight anymore.

“ _Harvey._ ”

Harvey pulls Mike into his arms, squeezes and holds tight as Mike’s open sobbing fills the condo, Harvey’s heart breaking anew with each broken sound. Harvey feels his own tears start to fall and he presses his face into Mike’s hair.

“I couldn’t – I couldn’t…”

Couldn’t call the funeral home? Couldn’t take care of her things? Couldn’t go into her room at the nursing home without her there?

“It’s okay.”

Mike continues to cry, hands clenched tight in the fabric of Harvey’s jacket, occasionally scrabbling to find tighter purchase, to get closer. Harvey squeezes him tighter.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here with you. I’m sorry I didn’t insist on staying there at the hospital with you.”

Mike nods, jerking his head up and down.

Harvey should have been there, and he wasn’t. And he misses her too. _God,_ he misses her already.

Mike’s sobs eventually die down and when Harvey pulls away to look at him, he looks sad and old and empty. Harvey pries the now wrinkled photos gently out of Mike’s hand and sets them on the table then leads him to the bedroom where he strips him down, tosses Mike’s suit on a chair, and then leads him into the bathroom. Harvey turns on the shower, checks the temperature, then gently moves Mike into the path of the spray. Mike’s head drops, water pounding on the top of his head and streaming down his body.

Harvey leaves the bedroom and reaches for his phone.

The phone rings three times on the other end and Harvey is almost afraid Louis isn’t going to pick up as retribution for Harvey’s earlier insult when he hears a terse _What do you want, Harvey?_ on the other end of the line.

“I need you to close this deal, Louis.”

“Right.” He huffs a disbelieving laugh. “Why would you give me the win? Harvey Specter never gives anyone the win.”

Harvey stares at Grammy’s panda, leaning up against the fireplace, glances at Mike and Grammy’s crumpled faces on the end table where Harvey set them, thinks about the question he didn’t get to ask Grammy, thinks about the ring in his dresser drawer, thinks of all the things to come she should have been a part of but will miss.

“It’s Mike.”

There’s a long pause on the other end of the line, then Louis says, quietly, “I’ll take care of it.”

+

Mike’s hands are braced against the tile wall, fingertips and knuckles going white with tension as he allows the hot water to cascade over the crown of his head and down his back. His eyes are closed and his forehead is resting on the tile, and Harvey watches from just outside the glass as Mike’s arms tremble, as the steam rises and swirls around him.

Harvey strips down and steps in the shower. His hands smooth their way down Mike’s arms to rest over his hands, fingers slotting in his as he curls his body around him, resting his chest against Mike’s back. The water temperature is turned down and the hands leave Mike’s to wrap around his chest, Harvey’s body shifting as he leans in to kiss Mike’s cheek, his shoulder, his temple. Mike drops his hands and lets his head fall back onto Harvey’s shoulder, and if Harvey’s arms weren’t holding him up, he’d fall straight to his knees.

The tear tracks are obvious, now that water isn’t pouring down Mike’s head, but Mike’s face is still impassive. Harvey curls his fingers over Mike’s ribs, kisses his neck, his shoulder, noses at his temple as he holds him.

“I’m sorry, Mike. I’m so sorry.”

Finally Mike’s eyes blink open and his feet steady beneath him, and Harvey reaches forward and squirts some shampoo into his hand. He reaches up and starts working it into a lather in Mike’s hair, fingers soothing and massaging Mike’s scalp. When he’s done he turns Mike around and tilts his head back, nudging him under the spray. Mike meets his eye and says nothing, and Harvey watches as the suds slip out of Mike’s hair, as they slide down Mike’s body toward the drain.

Harvey still doesn’t know what to say. So instead he works conditioner into Mike’s hair, he squirts body wash onto a loofah, he gently washes Mike, inch by inch. And when they’re done he dries him off the same way, inch by inch, and nudges him into bed, sliding in himself and pulling Mike into his arms, Mike’s face tucked into his neck, Harvey’s arms holding him tight.

+

Harvey’s aware that when Mike wakes up tomorrow, everything won’t magically be okay. His eyes may still be hollow, he’ll probably need reminders to eat and sleep and bathe. And Grammy will still be dead. There are plans to be made, a funeral home to talk to, Grammy’s room to be cleaned out. And eventually, sooner than he’d like, Mike will have to say goodbye to the woman who raised him, to the one person he’s always had, no matter how bad everything got.

But he won’t have to do it alone.

{fin}


End file.
